A KASHGAR GRANDMOTHER.
Page 64.
Kashgar is a great resort of traders, and the degrading custom of temporary marriages is in full force, a man often marrying a woman for a week or even a couple of days, the mulla who performs the ceremony arranging for the divorce at the same time. The missionaries told me that most of the women in Kashgar had been married several times, and this constant divorce leads to the wives taking whatever they can from their husbands and secreting it against a rainy day. And one cannot blame them; for, if a man wants to get rid of his helpmate, especially if she be old, he often ill-treats her in order to force her to divorce him and thus free him from the necessity of restoring her dowry. If she does this she may find herself in evil case without means of subsistence, and possibly unable to remarry.
How the children fare in all these matrimonial complications must be left to the imagination. Fortunately marriage is a far more stable institution in the villages, where monogamy is the practice and divorce uncommon. Here the women are more on an equality with their husbands, though on one occasion Mr. Bohlin saw a man guiding a plough to which he had harnessed his wife and a donkey!
The Chinese also practise polygamy; but they never divorce a wife if she be the mother of a son, and I understand that they do not approve of the practice at all, regarding it as the ruin of family life and as full of evil consequences to the children.
CHAPTER IV
ROUND ABOUT KASHGAR
Arabic is science, Persian is sugar,
Hindustani is salt, but Turki is Art.